A Bit More About the Book

Okay, so I promised someone (that's you Soul Riser) that I would try to get a bit more up tonight. I don't know about the rest of you who do this, but if I don't post every day I might disappear for a while. Must maintain the momentum! And always alliterate. But I digress...

I just got done with a paper, one that will probably become two chapters in the book. In the first part, I talk about the National Education Summits, and some documents produced for them, called briefing books. These are more or less propaganda pieces for those attending the Summits. They state the policy, and spend a lot of time rationalizing and justifying it. I'm interested in how they think about students. How do they imagine what students do? Who do they think students are? How they act? What motivates them? More or less, how do these policy makers, as they construct policy, create a space in which students are supposed to be, act, feel, think, socialize, and so forth. Why care?

Well, for those of you who don't know me, I'm a rhetorician. I'm a theorist and critic of language in service of power--ideology (as I believe John Thompson put it in his book, Theories of Ideology--not sure on that cite), and how language is used in the process of creating a person's subjectivity. To make it a bit more clear, if human beings are biological, they also are a conglomeration of biological systems, one of which is the nervous system. I think about the "software" for this biological system. That is, to extend the metaphor, in perhaps the same way a computer uses electrons, hardware, and software to proces information, humans use neural impulses generated by stimuli, wetware, and, particularly important to me, language to process information, and to get work done. Some of this processing is conscious and some of it is unconscious. Some of it relies on the particular person, his or her particular "software" which includes languages, dialects, material-cultural environment, social knowledge, and many other elements of the languages that help us to think. With me so far?

Well, rhetoricians, me at least, think about how the use of language is crucial for shaping perceptions, consciousness, and so forth. I mean this not just for individual human beings, but also social groupings of various sizes including families, organizations, political and class groupings, people of various cultures, and pretty much any other social grouping you could think of. Where these things are happening, you can find people using language to make it happen. Okay, so that's what I start with.

One idea that's important for my work is that of "subject-position." Think of it this way. If the language of policy tells a "story" of some sort, then it tells about characters like teachers, students, etc.; it has some sort of plot with drama, not so much comedy, and maybe a bit of tragedy and melodrama. It may even have a happy ending and a moral of some sort. More or less, all kinds of language, including statements of educational policy, help to create the ways in which we live, think about the world around it, imagine the people and situations that comprise our cultures, and pretty much make sense of things. A subject-position is a "character type" in language and other symbol systems. It not only describes how someone is, it prescribes how they should be. When policy makers use a term like "student," they mean it in a particular way. They means who you are, how you act, why you act that way, what the greater meaning of your life and efforts is, and the like. Having power means being able to tell others how they ought to be. That's what policy is: a statement of various "oughts" and "ought-nots" about how we might conduct ourselves in the world.

Policy makers, in this case the United States' governors, hold these Summits, and issue these policy statements, but they also have the power to cause others to implement them. So, it's very important that they do so in a way that deals with, in this case, education policy so that it provides a plan that solves problems instead of causing or perpetuating them, so that it makes the world a better place, so that it deals with the real world or at least something approaching it. In this case, with the governors and the Summits... mmm.... not so much.

Here are my basic assumptions (from the paper), which lay out a problem that occurs when policy makers don't have a clue as to, in this case, their audience. Please be aware that the text is followed by some endnotes that contain additional information from other sources. Be warned, it's a little bit academic in tone, but then again, I am an academic after all:

(1) The discourse of public education reform, as embodied in the NES events, constitutes a relatively stable discourse formation[i] that can be examined to determine the rhetorical basis for the material practices labeled “school reform”; (2) that within the discourse formation of school reform, one can find one or more subject-positions for students; (3) that the ways in which student subject-positions are conceived in the language of reform both reflects and affects the ways in which those who control the educational processes think about students’ roles and behaviors within the system;[ii] (4) that these presuppositions about the student constitute an ideal for appropriate student agency, a basis of comparison to which actual, living, breathing, fallible human beings will be compared; (5) that the subject-positions available to student in the policy discourse will always be insufficient to describe the full range of human behaviors, feelings, motivation, and attitudes of which students are capable; (6) that, as a result of the failure of the system to account for such variability in student subjectivity, some of those students will fail to meet the ideal, for whatever reason; (7) that students’ failure to meet the ideal, combined with the discourses of measurement[iii] that serve to rationalize that ideal in the first place, and to assess whether students are meeting it in the second place, will serve to justify: (a) scapegoating students for failure to fulfill the ideal, (b) implementation of additional means of control in order to bring those students back in line with the policy conception of ideal student subject-position, and (c) punishing or exiling any students so recalcitrant as to fail to fall in line.

[i] Cf., Laclau & Mouffe (1985).

[ii] Cf., Levin (1993).

[iii] This term comes from Cintron (1997). In his view, discourses of measurement are, “a broad metaphor to imply precision, the sort of precision that is often associated with numbers. Most simply, the discourses of measurement are ways by which a precise order (or the fiction of a precise order) gets made” (p. 210). He does not restrict these discourses to ordinary language. In fact, in Cintron’s view, “discourses of measurement… are practices but also ways of speaking and thinking that create order, coherence, and sets of rules to organize the otherwise random motions of everyday life (p. 211). According to Cintron, discourses of measurement have four primary characteristics:

1. They begin with “an identification of a kind of emptiness, formlessness, or ambiguity, and it is to this emptiness, now targeted, that the discourses address themselves” (p. 212). Note also, that this emptiness can be conceived as a kind of wilderness or disorder. Additionally, Cintron suggests, “There has also emerged, of course, an expert class” (p. 212) with specialized knowledge and technologies available to them, making them tamers of the void, of the wild.

2. “The discourses of measurement tend to belittle other knowing systems—implicitly, if not explicitly—or at least to make a prior discourse of measurement obsolete” (p. 213).

3. “Quite often, the discourses of measurement are aimed at the control of perceived death, decay, and instability… In a larger sense, the discourses of measurement are the actions of culture as they encounter wildness, which is sometimes symbolized as nature” (pp. 213-214). He notes that extremely tight control may lead to overcompensation against ambiguity, leading to additional problems: “…systems of prodigious control may be inherently more fragile and filled with crises than systems of less control” (p. 214).

4. “… they are thoroughly integrated into the economic sphere” (p. 214) This integration happens in a couple of ways: discourses of measurement tend to be caught up in general operations of capitalist economy (e.g., education of a workforce), but they also become professionalized, leading to occupations, practices, and products that serve to maintain, amend, and extend particular discourses of measurement (e.g., educational standards, assessment, and accountability). Further, there may emerge a hierarchy of specific economies serving differentiated roles in the processes of control (See pp. 215-216).

This leads to the implication that discourses of measurement must operate in a largely illusory realm in order to maintain their rationality and coherence. They seem, on their face, to make a great deal of sense, are of great utility in selling public policy to a given public, and purport to be adept at controlling those things they describe. However, Cintron suggests, and I tend to agree, that, “…public life can never be made into a neat and clean but must always coexist with its dirt. … the language of crisis results from the discourses of measurement, particularly its failed expectations, and so the many crises… cannot be understood outside that falsely manufactured world delivered to us by those many discourses” (p. 226). There is, in fact, the illusion of control, but never any real control. In cannot help but think SBR is the same sort of wishful thinking.

Works Cited

Cintron, Ralph. 1997. Angels' town: Chero ways, gang life, and rhetorics of the everyday. Boston: Beacon Press.

Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and socialist strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics. New York: Verso.

Levin, Benjamin. 1993. Students and educational productivity. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 1(5). Retrieved August 5, 2005 from http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v1n5.html.